The Sacrifice
by nightrose.spn
Summary: The moment Dean breaks is the one where he forgets the most important thing. Set during Dean's time in Hell.


**Title: **The Sacrifice

**Author**: nightrose_spn

**Pairings**: Sam/Dean

**Rating**: R

**Word Count**: 1125

**Summary**: The moment Dean breaks is the moment he forgets the most important thing. Set during Dean's time in Hell.

**Notes/Warnings**: Warnings for violence, gore, language. Short one-shot. S3 spoilers.

The sky of hell rains blood and fire the day Dean Winchester breaks, but that's not what does it. It is not the newly darkened eyes or the soft smirk that returns to his face with a new coldness. Before all that, they know.  
The exact moment that they turn him to their purpose is when his screams change. For four months of Earth's time and forty years of theirs, they've heard the same, desperate, agonized cry. When they let him speak, when he's not gagged, when his tongue hasn't been ripped out or his lips sliced neatly away, he cries, screams, whispers it.  
"Do it to me. Whatever you're gonna do. Do it to me. Me. Not Sammy. Don't hurt Sammy, hurt me. Don't do it to Sammy, do it to me."  
It makes them sick. This love, all pure and good even though it's all twisted up in sin. Though they are creatures of sin, they hate it. It is what hurts them, what makes them vicious and cruel. Their function is to hate sin and to punish it, while reveling in it all the same. They cannot bear Dean's love for his brother. Beneath the unnatural acts they have committed, there is only one emotion. If Dean were a rapist, an incestuous child molester, they would know how to hate him. They see plenty of those people on the rack.  
He isn't. Every time he touched Sam, his own brother, it was with the great, shining, pure feeling they see in his soul. White as snow, untouched, unsullied by anything so complicated as lust or sin. Just love.  
It confuses them. Even if it weren't for the orders from the great ones, the clear instruction that Dean Winchester must be broken quickly, they would have done it, heaped the torture even more unbearable than their usual upon the hunter. Not just because they despise his kind (he'd sent many of them here, after all) but because his love makes them physically hurt.  
They use it. Whisper lies and half-truths about his brother into his tattered ears. Tell him Sam's forgotten him, Sam's in heaven, Sam's on the next table over, Sam's dead, Sam's in love with someone else, Sam hates him now.  
He believes them, one by one, but it doesn't help. Nothing can shake that unfathomable love in his soul. Still he keeps up his speech, begging them. Demanding. Commanding them to hurt him, not Sam.  
After forty years, no rest, no moments or seconds away from the sheer excruciating physical agony, he breaks. He finally says something else, something besides his pleas for them not to touch Sam and the occasional whispered, "Love you, Sammy," before they rip the last shred of meat from his bones.  
The moment Dean breaks is the second that, "Not Sammy. Don't do it to Sammy. Do it to me. Not Sammy, not Sammy. Me," turns into, "Not me. Don't do it to me. Do it to Sammy. Not me, not me. Sammy."  
It has taken an unimaginable amount of work to get him here. They cheer as he clears his throat and rises from the rack. Dean closes jade-green eyes for the last time.  
When he opens them, they are black.  
He cannot forgive himself for that. Not ever.  
He is here for Sam. He shouldn't forget that. He consigned himself to this so Sam would live. For the first ten years, he never wavered. Dean would have done it again in an instant, would have leapt onto the table, under the demons' knives, so Sam wouldn't be hurt. The second twenty, he'd started to think that maybe he should've just killed himself. Sammy wouldn't be in hell, he's good, pure goodness. Neither of them would have to know this pain.  
Then self-hatred and loneliness and sheer physical agony meet. They turn him into a monster.  
When Dean looks down at himself in the pool of a soul's blood, he doesn't see a difference. He's never been far from this. After all, he slept with his own innocent baby brother. The demons tell him that Sam never wanted that, that he was afraid. Says their father hurt him like that and he thought if he didn't give in to Dean, Dean would just rape him.  
He believes it most of the time.  
Maybe he saved a few lives here and there. He left behind a string of broken noses and broken hearts, he never cared for anyone outside his family, and sometimes he failed. All the death, all the weight on his shoulders.  
They aren't as heavy as the words.  
"Don't do it to me. Do it to Sammy."  
He can't take the pain anymore. Couldn't. If Sam were here in front of him, Dean wouldn't throw him to the waiting demons, but if it came to a cold, logical choice…  
He would let his brother suffer so he didn't have to.  
Dean was supposed to be the sacrifice.  
He hopes Sam never finds out he couldn't be.  
Hell is lonely. He hates himself, and when he's too tired, when he can't hold out that level of self-loathing anymore, the demons hand him a knife and shove him in some chamber with a bound and helpless soul and let Dean make ithem/i do the hating for him. His eyes, his face, his hands, his heart are spattered with blood.  
He does not deserve redemption.  
All he can do, the only thing he wishes for, is that Sam remembers him. He doesn't even care anymore if it's with pure hate, if Sam is glad he's gone, jealous that he doesn't get to make Dean suffer himself. Honestly, he just hopes he isn't forgotten.  
He dreams, in the waking way that is all he can manage now, that Sam still loves him. The demons were lying, Sam wanted him, thinks of him fondly when he's driving home from work to meet his wife and kids. Sam is grateful for the years Dean spent caring for him. Sam visits his grave and lays flowers on it and tells his 2.3 children fantasy stories about the Winchester boys and their ghost-hunting exploits.  
But he doesn't need that. That would be the closest to heaven he can imagine, to have Sammy happy, to have Sammy miss him. He'd settle for hatred, as long as someone knows he's gone.  
Did Dean make a difference to anyone that lasted longer than one night?  
There's something to be said for the work of hell. It is never uneventful. He knows that none of the people tortures will forget his face. Every feature is marked in their minds with blood.  
When Dean is weary of hating and hoping, he is glad of that.


End file.
